THIS MONTH marks the 10th anniversary of this column. It seems like just yesterday when I was asked to contribute after gaining notoriety from a cover article in Money magazine titled, “Beware, Retirement Plan Rip-Off.” That eight-page article illustrated how hidden fees charged by 401(k) providers ranged by as much as 600 percent from the highest to the lowest for the same level of service.

A year later, Money had a short anniversary article that dubbed the original as possibly the most important article ever published in the magazine — saving investors as much as $1.5 billion per year.

Events of the past two years just confirm the value of maintaining a jaundiced view of the financial services industry. If there is ever a recurring theme in my “weekly requirement” of a column, it is the healthy skepticism only possible for someone working in retirement plan administration — a backwater in the sea of financial services. For 30 years, annual retirement plan reporting has had me sitting at the turnstile of thousands of plans, and gaining at least some perspective as to what works and what constitutes a disaster. Remember all those limited partnerships that went broke back in the ’80s? Remember the market-timing services that were the vogue until they missed the 25 percent single-day loss in 1987? Remember those managed accounts of the brokerage firms that charged 3 full percentage points per year and fell way below any market averages? I have seen everything that didn’t work.

While it may be called “the lost decade” by some, we could not have had a better learning experience than the last 10 years has offered. The period followed a four-year stretch in the late nineties when the market rose by more than 20 percent four years in a row, and then we endured the last two years when the market had the most precipitous decline since The Great Depression. Anyone staying the course (my advice to avoid “the noise” back in 1999) has lived through two major crashes in this period, has seen two “snapbacks,” and has made money as we speak. Someone diversified over several investment types, including small cap and foreign funds (my 2000 suggestion that diversification creates the “path of minimum regret”), has actually made an annual average 6 percent over the past 10 years.

Anyone wishing to protect against the downside would have done well to move about a third of their assets to a combination of bond funds (Vanguard short term corporate, GNMA and High Yield) that were mentioned in several columns years ago. Having a third of one’s money in that bond-fund mix and the rest in stock funds would have reduced the impact of the recent market downdraft. Today, that same allocation, including a diversified mix of stock investment types, is up substantially — by more than 20 percent for the year to date. Someone inclined to panic back in March would have been reading my cheerful column about Warren Buffett and his impression of feeling “like a mosquito in a nudist colony” as he made multibillion dollar purchases in some of this year’s basket-cases.

Speaking of Mr. Buffett, last week’s purchase of Burlington Northern Railroad was his bet on the resilience of the American economy, because railroads make money when the economy heats up. The market, I can promise, “will fluctuate,” but the next 10 years will offer major rewards for those with self-discipline and a pragmatic approach to the simple rules of investment success.